Company

Chip Stearns has more than two decades of executive and senior management experience, the most recent five years as President and CEO of Stream Processors, Inc. Stream Processors is a fabless semiconductor company and a leader in parallel processors for video and graphics embedded markets. Prior to Stream Processors, Stearns spent three years as vice president in operations and marketing for HelloSoft, Inc. Prior to HelloSoft, he was president and CEO of picoTurbo, Inc., an embedded processor licensing company that was acquired by ARM Holdings plc. Before joining picoTurbo, Stearns was the founder and CEO of MediaShower, Inc., and prior to that he was the General Manager for video and graphics products at S3 Inc. Stearns also held key management roles in graphics development at Vertex Semiconductor and LSI Logic.

Chip holds 12 technology patents, and has received industry awards for innovative technology development. He has taught numerous professional courses and delivered over a dozen technical and business papers at conferences around the world. He holds a M.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

James, a native of Belfast, is the technical visionary behind Caustic and one of the company's three founders. Most recently he was the chief architect of Apple's next-generation embedded rasterization algorithms, the basis of the rendering and compositing technology used in the iPhone and iPod. He was also a lead architect for Apple's OpenGL graphics system, and worked with the OpenGL standards committee to create early specifications for programmable shading languages.

Before Apple, James wrote the world's first fully interactive 3D rendering engine and first-person shooter game for the Palm mobile platform. Upon moving to the U.S. in 2000, James worked at Firepad where he continued to develop the mobile rendering technologies that formed the foundation of street mapping solutions available on today's most innovative mobile phones.

Bill Leetham has over 20 years of financial management experience with companies large and small, public and private. He has successfully led two initial public offerings raising over $75 million and has raised similar amounts in private equity and debt offerings, and has managed companies through the acquisition process.

Bill has led accounting, financial planning, legal, treasury, human resources and tax organizations in multiple high technology companies, and has served as the CFO or VP of Financial Operations for Berkeley Systems, Candle Corporation, Scopus Technology, Success Factor Systems, and Zero G Software. Bill is also a partner of FLG Partners LLC, a leading CFO services advisory firm. Bill holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Oregon State University and an M.B.A. in Finance and Management from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Sandro is an accomplished hardware engineer with two decades of experience in the design, development and delivery of market leading graphics and video technology. Prior to joining Caustic, Sandro was a Director of Engineering at Nvidia for a complex 0.65 nm low power mobile system on a chip. Previously he lead engineering, architecture, design and verification teams at PortalPlayer for their low power embedded SOC. Earlier in his career, Sandro served in a variety of technical and management roles at Andes Networks, VM-LABS, 3DO and Mentor Graphics.

Sandro is fluent in Spanish, English, German and Italian, and has an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Universidad de Chile. Sandro has four issued patents and has previously served as a guest lecturer at the University of California Berkeley.

Alex Kelley has over 20-years of sales, marketing, and general management experience in 3D computer graphics. Prior to joining Caustic Graphics, Alex was a Vice President at Autodesk, the third largest software company in the world. There he managed all sales and marketing functions for the Media & Entertainment division in Japan and was responsible for annual sales in excess of $48M. Prior to Autodesk, Alex was a long-time Vice President at Alias, a leading 3D computer graphics software company. He managed all facets of sales, marketing and operations for Asia-Pacific with over 60 multinational staff located across Japan, Korea, China and Singapore.

Alex begin his career in computer graphics as a researcher, and published his seminal work on terrain simulation in the Proceedings for ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics in 1988. After graduate school he joined AT&T Bell Labs and was part of the team that developed the Pixel Machine, one of the first parallel image computers. Alex is fluent in Japanese, and holds a B.S. and M.S. degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University.